For decades, retail sales and services have been automated to greater or lesser degrees. Historically in many European countries, shopkeepers of bakeries and other purveyors have long provided simple vending machines to dispense their products at their street entrances after business hours. More ambitiously automated restaurants are already legendary in the history of the United States. Other and more recent entrants in the automated retail sales and service industries include automated teller machines (ATMs), custom greeting card kiosks, automated lottery machines and other home and commercial business terminals including various Internet services available via personal computer.
Retail terminal technology generally, however, has been pervaded by a fundamental flaw which itself has gone completely unrecognized. This flaw becomes apparent when one considers the piecemeal character of retail terminals of all types in the applicable prior art. Without any known exception, automated retail functions are provided only to address particular and narrow needs. An ATM may dispense postage stamps, but treats the stamp sheets virtually as an alternate currency in a limited menu of deposit and cash access services. Lottery machines dispense lottery tickets; insurance machines dispense insurance policies; and fancy pay telephones and the most advanced home computers function primarily as old-fashioned credit card order lines for the various products and services available online. In short, even in the most recent instances the only advantage in retail automation has been the same as it has been for many years—the elimination of the human attendant.
A need thus remains for an innovation in the area of automated retail goods and services in which an automated transaction machine does more than merely provide existing goods and services in a simple automated way.